Writer, Gamer, Publishing Geek

Already a Hero: Having Fun with Twitter Fiction

Back in January, when I was asked to be part of this year’s Twitter Fiction Festival, I was thrilled. Not only were there a large number of authors I adored and admired, but the combination of social media and publishing was the perfect mashup of all the things I loved.

However, with a list of featured authors that included people like Emma Straub, Gail Carriger, Julie Kagawa, Jim Gaffigan, Ben H. Winters, and Ian Doescher… well, it was pretty easy to get intimidated and anxious almost immediately.

So I decided to just have fun, and go with a genre I’d never played in, but always loved. Web comics.

And #TwitterFiction sure seemed like the perfect outlet. The stories are meant to be short, quick, span a few tweets (or sometimes only one), and that’s it. Web comics use a few squares and sometimes a single image to tell a story or convey a feeling.

For my Twitter Fiction Festival story, Already a Hero, I teamed up with Juan Carlos Solon, an amazing illustrator from Toronto who did the adorable 8-bit pixel art for my first book with Quirk. He even went so far as to animate the images for the piece! The animated gifs wouldn’t appear on Twitter, so here they are, for you! And I hope the story and the images make you smile.

-#-

Already a Hero by Eric Smith

Illustrated by Juan Carlos Solon

Late on one Thursday afternoon, the phone rang right on cue.

This had been going on for weeks, so it was nothing new.

“He’s sick again, his heart meter’s dry,” the teacher said, so cool,

“You’ll have to drive on over, come and pick him up from school.”

His Mom arrived, she walked right in, and sighed with the school nurse.

There was her son, he had no hearts! (Though things could be much worse.)